OA204] AN EXCEL-BASED TOOL FOR IMPROVING PATIENT DOSE DATA REPORTING AND ANALYSIS

Abstract

Purpose The radiation protection legislation requires patient dose surveys to be organized and diagnostic reference levels (DRLs) to be established and further used by radiology facilities for benchmarking and optimizing their local practice. To facilitate this process, an online data collection platform for national dose surveys in diagnostic and interventional radiology was created by the Ministry of Health. To report their data in absence of dose tracking software, the hospital staff needs to enter data manually through the platform interface. This paper presents a tool developed to speed up this process and reduce human errors. Methods and Materials A freeware application idRS was developed that constitutes electronic forms in Excel (Microsoft Corporation, USA) format with interactive functions written in Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Its role is to gather needed data from a manually or automatically populated Excel table, and transfer them to the online platform. The interactive features include checking for technical errors in the data sample, guiding hints for users, automatic data transmission, automatic estimation of the typical (mean) dose of the sample and comparison of this value with the current national DRL and/or values published in the scientific literature. Results Separate versions for radiography, fluoroscopy and computed tomography were created. They were tested with 880 real patient dose data recorded in three X-ray departments, and previously submitted manually through the online platform. No difference was found between the calculated mean values from data sets transferred with idRS and previously reported. The results of testing the idRS with two different computer configurations found difference of less than 2 s in the transfer time for 20 patients per procedure, which varied between 7 s for radiography and 20.7 s for multi-phase CT. Conclusion The idRS application significantly simplified and improved the process of submitting patient data to the online platform. It is expected that this will encourage more hospitals to contribute to the national dose data collection and for using the platform for establishing their local typical doses.